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USB Clicks and Pops

Hypnotoad

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NUC5PPYH, Win 10 1809, WASPI, native USB2 driver, Topping D30.

I was plagued by clicks and pops when using Win10 on an old PC with my Topping D30, tried everything, went through pages of supposed fixes I found online, then I wiped Win10 and put on Ubuntu, no more clicks and pops. Another ASR member showed me how to get bit perfect playback and all is good. Oh and the D30 was plug and play with Ubuntu no driver installation needed. I don't use streaming though but like everything else on Linux it can be done but I'm not the one to ask.
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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I was plagued by clicks and pops when using Win10 on an old PC with my Topping D30, tried everything, went through pages of supposed fixes I found online, then I wiped Win10 and put on Ubuntu, no more clicks and pops. Another ASR member showed me how to get bit perfect playback and all is good. Oh and the D30 was plug and play with Ubuntu no driver installation needed. I don't use streaming though but like everything else on Linux it can be done but I'm not the one to ask.

I havn't ruled Linux out.
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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OK, I do get an occasional red bar, but no click when it happens.
 

daftcombo

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High DPC latencies are a PITA! Especially if the offending driver is for a hardware device you can't easily change such as a LAN port in a laptop, NUC or similar.

I've had some problems with NVIDIA video cards in the desktop I configured for music creation. Clicks and pops over Firewire with ASIO even at higher sample buffers which was really frustrating. After using DPC Latency Checker to troubleshoot, I finally switched to an AMD Radeon card and now I can run a lower buffer (equals better responsiveness) without issue.

How did you find out the NVIDIA card was the culprit ? You couldn't try disabling it, right?
 

Guermantes

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No, I couldn't disable it as there was no alternative graphics hardware on the motherboard.

LatencyMon (not Checker, my mistake) was showing dxgkrnl.sys and the NVIDIA kernel mode driver were causing spikes which coincided with clicks in the audio. I searched for info on this and found it to be a reasonably common issue with NVIDIA hardware (I had a GTX 950 installed). So I tried a variety of settings in software and bios to try and alleviate it but with little improvement. In the end I bought a cheap Radeon card, installed it and immediately had an improvement without extra tweaks.

Now this result may be specific to my use-case and the software I was using on my Windows 7 box. I use virtual instruments and effects in Reaper audio software with realtime MIDI and audio streams, so it may be more demanding than other audio use-cases. It may be that I didn't troubleshoot the problem exhaustively enough and some other element was not playing happily with the graphics driver and delaying procedure calls. But in the end, changing to the Radeon card simply made the problem go away.

On the other hand, I have had an NVIDIA card in my Win7 audio PC at work for years without these issues, but that is a whole different set of hardware and software involved . . .
 

Zog

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I seem to recall windows USB ports shared the same line of something, a Bus I guess. So you can have half a dozen USB outlets and only one or two buses. It is quite a while since I built PCs but I think you can use Device Manager and/or the motherboard manual to identify what ports are connected to what buses. In your case you would want to have your music on one line and everything else (mouse, keyboard, other peripherals) sharing the other. Also you can check out Fideliser to give your software priority.
 

Hypnotoad

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I just updated to Windows 10 v1903 and get worse latency now (according to LatencyCheck, with red bars and that).
I'm not alone,

Ubuntu/Linux:

come-to-the-dark-side.jpg
 

Guermantes

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Native Instruments have an audio troubleshooting page including steps on using LatencyMon to find misbehaving drivers in Windows 7 to 10:
https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/209571729

While primarily aimed at people using their music creation software and hardware, it has some sections that provide a good description of troubleshooting DPC latencies for real-time audio that can be applied more generally. Section 3.2 and all of section 4 are quite relevant.
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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daftcombo

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This bug is now being widely reported. It's in ntoskrnl.exe which can't be turned off. People are reporting it in Windows help forums. I have rolled back to 1809 and don't expect a fix until at least July.
I don't have issues to listen to music with ASIO4All though. I even have LESS issues with the Focusrite ASIO driver than I used to before the 1903 version. Perhaps because I updated all drivers including NVIDIA card.
 

eliash

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May I recommend this (haven´t seen this thread when signing up here):

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/high-resolution-audio.6525/post-183796

Free PRIO SW helped in the case of WIN XP, I understood that in WIN7 or higher one does have direct control of the process priority.
Even with that old machine I can start and run Firefox, some MS Office, etc. in parallel, no issues.

In case of using Sabre chips, this might help as well:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ess-thd-‘hump’-investigation.5752/post-180723


Good luck!
 

daftcombo

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Thank you.
In between I noticed that Focusrite just released new drivers for the Scarlett 2i4 a few days ago (they hadn't for a year or so).
I also updated again the NVidia driver with a new one found on NVidia website.
One of those things or both reduced a lot (to none actually) my issues with the Scarlett, even without ASIO4All.

Still LatencyMon shows a lot of bad activity with Win10 1903, even with yesterday's new Win update.
 

Grattle

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Have thunderbolt? I've noticed a difference between the built in usb ports on my 2012 Macbook Pro, and the usb 3 port on a thunderbolt adapter I have. I always use the external port, and it's certainly cleaner.
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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I have seen a lot of possible fixes for the Win 10 1903 latency problem all of which relate to CPU behavior. They don't work. Then I saw a post which said LatencyMon may be incorrectly reporting the problem as ntoskrnl.exe. The author said all the drivers run through there, so treat it as a driver problem. I turned off Nvidia HD Audio and ASmedia USB 3.1. LatencyMon ran for 45 minutes without a hiccup.

Anyway, try the trial and error approach with devices before playing with CPU throttling and the like.
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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So far the best I can do is an occasional peak DPC of 3000 ms, give or take. That means the machine might run for 20 minutes without any problem. Nothing completely solves the problem although turning off all unused sound devices in the sound control panel helps. The first screen capture looks strange to me. Notice how CPU 0 seems to be doing nearly all the work but the latency fault is on CPU's 2 and 3. I ran Latencymon on my NUC win 1809 and the CPU work appeared to be evenly distributed. I can't verify clicks and pops.
Capture3.JPG
Capture2.JPG
 
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Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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@restorer-john the NUC on 1809 is fixed. All it took was rolling back the driver for the NIC. The other machine isn't used for music much and it has some latency problems (and some other issues) on both 1809 and 1903.
 
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